CRCA Lunchtime Talk - Documenting Digital and New Media Art

Digital and new media art has presented unexpected challenges in documenting performances. The complexity of the experience with components inserted live, from audio and video input, and from computer generated elements, along with spatial emphasis strains the videographer's attempt to render it into a conventional format.

Panel Members: Doug Ramsey and Alex Matthews from Calit2 have addressed these problems and been able to overcome some of these issues. Ramsey and Matthews produced the HD capture of a recent performance of Sanctuary, a percussion composition by Roger Reynolds, which was performed by Red Fish Blue Fish in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. This unusual setting for a musical performance and the complexity of the multimedia experience presented numerous obstacles they managed to overcome. The Calit2 team also recently captured the early-March performance of Kamza and Bar Kamza, by Music professor Shlomo Dubnov, and they are presently in production of a DVD of Stay the Hand, a multimedia dance performance given at Birch North Park Theater this month.

Todd Margolis, Technical Director of CRCA, is also an artist, educator and technologist and has extensive experience in the production of immersive and interactive media. These ephemeral media pose their own difficulties, yet Margolis has managed to produce effective documentations of them while retaining a good sense of the experiences. Currently he is a collaborator on the Atlas In Silico project, which premiered at SIGGRAPH 2007 festival and will be shown this year at the Ingenuity Festival as well as the LA Municipal Art Gallery. Some of his prior projects include Special Treatment, an immersive and interactive virtual reality installation based on the architecture of the Auschwitz II/Birkenau concentration camp and is inhabited by those latent memories; Immersagrams produced thru his collaboration with artn.com; and was a co-developer of the auto-stereoscopic barrier strip virtual reality display (Varrier). This discussion can be of great help to all artists/researchers, editors, photographers, sound and communications people and anyone who appreciates the creative talents of enhancing artistic expression with computer input and translating a performance or other event into a video/audio for wider distribution.